


Don't Go Walking Slow

by lastinthebox



Category: The Guest (2014)
Genre: Canon - Character Deaths, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, Multi, Tags to be added, implied Anna Peterson/David Collins
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-04-29 10:01:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5123444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastinthebox/pseuds/lastinthebox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are directionless, with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. Anna and Luke run for their lives, orphans in the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Here's something that's been sitting in an open Word doc for about a year. Part one of two or three.

They leave Moriarty under the cover of dark.

She can hardly stand to walk, bleeding through the bandages and struggling for breath as her brother half-drags her all the way back to the diner. It’s cordoned off and swarming with media and police, the façade blown out like something off world news. Mass chaos and a wish and a prayer see them into her truck and out of town.

They are directionless, with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. Anna and Luke run for their lives, orphans in the night.

“Where will we go?” he asks after miles and miles of stretching freeway.

“East,” she finally decides.

“Why east?” he asks.

She chews on her lip and pushes down on the accelerator. They hit a bump and blood fills Anna’s mouth. Her leg’s gone numb, but the pain remains. “Why not.”

 

::

 

“We stop when it gets light, try to rest during the day or whatever. Until we get where we’re going.”

Luke drags his fingers through his shorn hair. “And where are we going? Do you even fucking know?”

“I,” and she falters. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Great,” he says. “You’ll figure it out. Awesome. East is a direction, you know, not a fucking destination. And you missed a spot.”

He storms out of the bathroom, slamming the flimsy door behind him. Anna hears the bed crack under his weight and turns her eyes back to the mirror. A blonde strip near her face shows through the ruddy box-color brown. She takes the piece by the end and chops it off.

 

::

 

Luke shuts down somewhere around El Paso. 

They’re in a Motel 6 off the I-10, huddled up in sour sheets and crowded in by stale tobacco smoke when he turns to her and starts with, “Our parents are dead, Anna.”

Anna breaks a little, grits her teeth and shuts her eyes against a wave of something like panic, something like grief. A profound heaviness seeps into her bones, drags her down and chokes her out. She pulls the covers over their heads to keep the monsters away.

When dusk falls, he gets in the truck without a word. He will not talk again for a long, long time.

 

::

 

A man in El Paso sells her a Caprice with North Dakota plates for two hundred, her old truck and a favor that has her washing her hands in a BP gas station until her fingers blister and prune under the hot water. 

After, she kicks at the bent back plate and asks, “Is the car clean?”

The man laughs. “Clean. _Clean?_ Fuck no, it ain’t clean. Better drive slow ‘cross them state lines, little girl.”

 

::

 

She turns twenty dollars into two grand in a shady club in Beaumont then drives them over the bridge into Louisiana. She pulls over at the rest stop. Luke curls up in the backseat and doesn’t cry and doesn’t sleep. She sits on the curb and drinks vending coffee until her throat’s gone dry and her eyes stop burning. 

 

::

 

In Mississippi, she dreams of Caleb’s smile.

In Alabama, she dreams of her mother’s embrace.

In Georgia, she dreams of her father’s voice.

In Florida, she dreams of the bluest eyes.

She doesn’t sleep much anymore.

 

::

 

“We’ll stop here for a while,” she says finally.

It’s a rundown town in South Carolina, but there’s a _now hiring_ sign up in the motel window and a manager desperate enough (or stupid enough) not to ask many questions. 

The manager lets them a room for half her pay, and it’s fine and it’s good, but the nights are long and lonely at the front desk, and Luke won’t talk, won’t pull his face out of his books, and Anna won’t stop peering into the dark, waiting for that beautiful monster to crawl up out of it like the worst kind of nightmare.

 

::

 

A month goes by.

She meets a boy called Dwayne who looks not at all like Zeke and smells like smoke and brings them pie from the diner he busses. He’s nice to Luke, even though Luke won’t talk, and he’s nice to Anna, even when she’s cold and cruel, makes her smile when his accent’s too thick.

As far as he knows, they’re from California with parents who hightailed it to Mexico. As far as he knows, the knife scar he mouths at on her thigh is from a cheerleading accident in high school (what a dumb fucking lie, she thinks). As far as he knows, Luke’s always been like that.

They sit on his tailgate and smoke cheap grass and drink cheap beer and stare up into the night sky together. He says it’s kinda awesome, ain’t it, and says bet you can’t see the stars like this in California. She’s says he’s kinda right, laughs when he pulls her into the crook of his arm, and kinda starts to forget.

 

::

 

“I want to go home,” her brother says one night.

The three of them are watching stupid late night talk shows, and his voice shocks her so bad she drops her beer onto the carpet. Dwayne steps towards the bathroom for a cloth.

“It’s fine,” Anna tells him. “I’ll deal with it. Give us a minute, okay.”

Dwayne shrugs, shutting the screen door gently behind him. Luke stares after him for a moment then turns to her. Turns on her.

“I want to go home,” he repeats.

“Luke, listen,” she starts.

“No!” he says. “You listen. I don’t want to be in this hickass town, around these hickass people, living in this hickass motel. _I want to go home_.”

“What? What home? There is _no home_ to go back to.”

“He let us go, Anna,” he says.

Anna blinks for a long moment then sits down heavily next to him, drops her pounding head into her hands. “Oh my god, Luke, you are fucking _delusional_ if that’s what you think.”

“Well, I’ll go with you or without you.”

Anna laughs. It’s a cold and bitter thing, ugly. “You have money? You have a car? You’re stuck with me, little brother, whether you fucking like it or not.”

 

::

 

Their new life ends on a Tuesday.

Dwayne pulls his cap around backwards, kisses her on the nose with breath like apple pie and menthol cigarettes, and says, “Your cousin came by the diner today.”

 

::

 

“Come with us,” Anna says, begs, pleads.

Luke’s packed into the Chevy, face in his hands and bags in his lap.

“Please,” she says. “Dwayne, please.”

“This is crazy,” Dwayne says. “This is insane.”

“Fine,” she says, and pulls her keys from her purse. They’re out of time and daylight’s burning. “Fine.”

“Fine,” Dwayne says around a mouth full of smoke. “But we’re taking my truck. And we’re taking my gun.”


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Monsters, she knows, are very real.

They drive into the dying sunlight, through the night, and pull over in Raleigh. 

Luke’s gone quiet in the backseat, Dwayne asleep and snoring against the passenger side window, and Anna’s mouth is thick and filmy with truck stop coffee and sunflower seeds and the double cheeseburger from three hours ago.

Dwayne’s 9mil is a heavy weight in her sweater pocket, the rifle wedged between the seat and the door digging into her calf. She waits and waits until the sky goes grey with dawn over the New Hope Church Road Walmart, then pulls the truck back onto the street.

 

::

 

“Tell me everything,” Dwayne says after.

They’re squatting in a beach shack somewhere between Seaford and Yorktown, maybe, but she’s not quite sure. She rolls over and away, tugs the corner of the blanket up and over the sweat cooling on her skin. Dwayne’s hand is hot on her stomach, his breath warm on her face.

A part of her wonders if telling him everything makes him complicit. A part of her knows he signed his death warrant when he threw their shit in his truck, when he handed her his favorite gun, when he skipped town with the two of them without even knowing why. 

A part of her knows it doesn’t really matter, because David won’t care and will kill Dwayne all the same.

“You didn’t have to come,” she says, her one last stand.

There’s a beat of silence that stretches on and on, so clear and quiet she can hear the ocean and the sound of Luke’s handheld game chirping from the next room over. Dwayne shifts on the bed, his hand skimming her ribs.

If Anna looks over, she’d see the wet glint in Dwayne’s eyes, the gleam of his teeth in the lantern glow. If Anna looks over, which she doesn’t, she’d see the dumb boy from a South Carolina diner who’d just decided he’s willing to kill for them. Die for them, even.

“Of course, I did,” is what Dwayne says, and then as earnest as she’s ever heard him, “I wanted to.”

 

::

 

They shelter in place for a few more days.

She pushes Vienna sausages around on a paper plate, sopping up the gravy with stale white bread. Luke doesn’t really eat anymore, but it’s not a battle Anna can win right now. He’ll have to eat sometime. He always does.

On a Saturday afternoon, cold and wet, Dwayne pulls into the yard in the busted sedan he’d traded for his busted truck. He walks into the kitchen, baseball cap pulled down low on his face. He presses his front to her back, tight enough she can feel the 9mil he’s got tucked in his waistband.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she says.

“I got a bad feeling,” he says.

“Okay,” she says.

And that’s that.

 

::

 

They’re packed up and in Baltimore by nightfall.

 

::

 

Sometimes, Anna’s heart just aches.

It aches for her mother and her father and Zeke. 

It aches for her life and Luke’s future and hers.

It aches for things she never really wanted before but will never have a chance to have: a home, a job, a friend, a kid.

Sometimes, Anna’s heart just aches.

 

::

 

Dwayne comes up on money in Baltimore, but doesn’t say how.

Rent is paid and food’s in their bellies and Luke’s got new games and Anna’s got new hair.

Every night, Dwayne presses his smoky mouth to the tip of her nose before sliding his sidearm into the back of his jeans, a digital scale and some latex gloves into his pockets. Every night, he cuffs Luke lightly on the back of his head and pinches the shell of his ear.

Every night, he slips out the door and down the stairs and Anna wonders what will get to him first, the streets or the ghost in New Mexico they left behind.

 

::

 

They’re huddled under the covers, she and Luke, like when they were little. Lights out in the room with the TV flickering blue in the dark and the sound turned low. He gestures to the TV, then kicks his clammy, cold foot into hers. “Kinda like us.”

“Gross,” she says, and kicks back. “Kinda not at all.”

“It could be,” Luke says, “It almost is. Driving across the country. Shitty motels and shitty food. Guns.”

Anna snorts. “That doesn’t make us like them, baby brother. That makes us fugitives.”

"They're fugitives, too.”

“Of course, they are,” she says. “And besides, they save people and kill monsters. We could barely save ourselves.”

They watch as the taller one swipes a fire poker through a pale lady in a tattered wedding dress, then as the other one says some crap in gibberish read from a tiny book. 

Later, when the TV’s off, when she’s tracking headlights moving back and forth across the ceiling and waiting and praying for first light to come, Luke turns over in the other bed and says, quiet like maybe he thinks she’s asleep, like maybe he’s saying it to himself, “We could save people, too. Because monsters aren’t real.”

Something cold is spreading through her chest, sticky and sharp and mean.

Because somewhere in Someplace, USA, there’s a man with a plan and a will to succeed.

Monsters, she knows, are very real.

 

:: ::

 

For a kid and a waitress and a high school dropout, they move fast.

He’s packed up and in Baltimore by nightfall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick transition piece for the final chapter. Sorry if you feel I have overused my OMC, but I suppose he kinda grew on me.
> 
> Also, not beta read.


End file.
